Around the Network today: A mega-employer demands more sustainable development near its headquarters, a city launches bike sharing, and NIMBYs resist sidewalks.

Google Wants Mixed-Use Development:Scaledown reports on what Google wants from the city where its global headquarters are located: mixed-use development and residential density. In a letter to the city of Mountain View, California, published in TechCrunch, Google executives had this to say: “Our goals for Google’s HQ are to provide a future redevelopment that is nurturing and regenerative to the environment, provide a vibrant community and worklife balance for all, and efficiently manage transportation and pedestrian access needs.” Chris at Scaledown writes that the letter demonstrates how simple livability measures might be much more critical to local economic and physical health than the popular public investments of previous decades, like arenas. (Andrew Basile, Jr., the Troy, Michigan employer whose anti-sprawl letter we published yesterday, would agree.)

Deco Bikes Arrives in Miami: Miami Beach will debut South Florida’s first bike-share system — Deco Bikes — tomorrow. Transit Miami reports the system will be launched with 500 bikes at 50 stations and later expanded to 1,000 bikes at 100 stations. Each station will hold 12 bikes and occupy two parking spaces. Transit Miami blogger Tony Garcia hopes the system will help greater Miami become more bike-friendly.

“With the implementation of sharrows on Washington and elsewhere in the beach, upcoming revised bicycle parking standards, and now the implementation of a city-wide bikeshare program, Miami Beach is making big strides to expand bicycle use around the city,” said Garcia. “If successful, other cities in the region like Miami and Coral Gables would be smart to look to Deco Bikes as a partner in creating a regional bike share network.”

Sidewalk Wars: Rob Pitingolo at Extraordinary Observations comments on the political battles taking place in suburban America over sidewalks, as outlined in a recent Wall Street Journal article. In some quarters, campaigns to install sidewalks have divided communities. Pedestrian infrastructure has sometimes faced fierce opposition from residents, as strange as that may sound. Pitingolo thinks, in these situations, sidewalks have simply become a symbol of progress. “I think the debates that are raging about sidewalks aren’t even really about sidewalks – they’re about change,” Pitingolo said. “Some people, for one reason or another, are scared of change, don’t like it and don’t want it.”

Heard the same from Twitter who apparently loves the new bike lanes on Market Street in SF and is considering moving HQ there.

LAofAnaheim

Why are these businesses all of a sudden asking their cities to become walkable neighborhoods when they choose to HQ in unwalkable areas and non-downtowns? If you want to make a statement, re-locate to the nearest urban area with good rail transit and other alternative forms of transportation, then cities will begin to “get it” once the tax revenue is gone.

car free nation

They want low rent too. The only way to get that is to change the zoning regulations in cities so they can build up.

John Murphy

For what it’s worth, Google is located on a bucolic bike path, that runs from downtown Mountain View where the train station is, 2 miles to Google. Not why they selected the location – but the campus is fairly serene. There aren’t a ton of retail/food establishments in walking range, but this is mitigated by in-house establishments on campus – food, laundry, barber, bike mechanic, dentist.

SteveS

This is a case where livability and environmentalism are not aligned: no amount of short mixed use buildings nearby will ever make a suburban campus come even remotely close to being as environmentally conscious as office space in a skyscraper.

But a large part of the blame for the proliferation of office parks and sprawling campuses in the peninsula and South Bay also lies with San Francisco’s anti-density culture, awful planning process and payroll tax.

LAofAnaheim

It seems like Google is crying like a spoiled child. Just pick up and move into San Francisco where you get all the urban needs you want. There’s no need to force a change to Mountain View if they don’t want it. Mountain View is not really considered an “urban paradise” or dares to be. If you want your employees to take transit, walk or bike to work, have the office located in an urban center. Now, if you are looking for “cheap rent” and “low taxes”, don’t complain that you chose Mountain View.

jd

Great to see this. I do think Google has become “evil” in some ways, but I still think they are better than most companies.

Couple comments ….

First, it is a good thing that Google is putting pressure on suburban cities to do this. I mean, sure you can argue that Google is “crying like a spoiled child” or is part of the problem, but at least they are trying to make things better. Look at all the other companies who plopped themselves in suburbia just like Google but who are *not* trying to improve the situation. Even though this doesn’t resolve Google of criticism, you must give credit where credit is due.

Second, the problem here is the differences in zoning and taxes in suburban areas versus cities. If we truly want to make our urban areas more livable, we need to get businesses to not flee to the suburbs. This means having a more united and regional plan so that you can’t have pockets of cities doing entirely different things in, for example, the Bay Area. Everybody needs to be more united and coherent and think “big picture”.

There are two ways to prevent business from fleeing to the suburbs: decrease taxes and cost of living in the city, or increase them in suburban areas. A company like Google requires massive amounts of space and they simple will pay much more for rent in a city than a suburb, and that’s because of the inherent nature of a suburb being less dense than a city. A city should be able to offer significantly reduced rent to businesses moving in, since, even though they lose money on rent, it will still be a net gain for the city since people follow the jobs, and since the company is going to go somewhere, we should be encouraging them to go in the places that are the most efficient and livable, which means cities.

Also, if we started internalizing the true cost of the suburban lifestyle (mostly the true cost of the car, but also the loss of habitat and biological diversity caused by sprawl … well, which is also mostly due to the car), this would natural help things take care of themselves as it would reduce the cost of being in a city and increase that of being in a suburb. And then businesses like Google would be much more likely to set up shop in a city.

One thing that does bug me about Google is their shuttle from SF. They should be encouraging people to take Caltrain and only shuttling them from the train station in Mountain View. They could put the savings towards Caltrain (or VTA, or MUNI, etc.). I don’t like that they are contributing to the problem of getting people to take public transit.

http://www.livablestreets.com/people/murphstahoe John Murphy

@jd – Google’s shuttles are a response to a few things. There are coveted employees who want to live in the city. A neighborhood to door shuttle is “typically” faster than Caltrain due to the last mile problem – even if they have a good shuttle from MV Caltrain to Shoreline campus, the Google employee in Noe Valley is still staring at a 30+ minute MUNI leg or a 15+ minute bike ride. This could be the difference between that employee exploring job opportunities at Twitter or some SoMa startup. Especially when the bus has wi-fi and Caltrain does not.

Now, they have built this workforce that includes a lot of people who live in SF. Let’s say Caltrain has a draconian service cut. That would dramatically impact Google – the shuttles are a self-defense mechanism, giving them control of their workforce’s commute.

If Caltrain wanted to recapture that ridership, they’d need to up their game. Wi-fi anyone?

jd

John: totally agree with you about Google’s shuttle, but that is the problem. Google is like someone saying: “I think public transit is great … as long as everybody else has to ride it”. Sure, there is the last mile issue, and sure the shuttle is faster. But there are also all the downsides of it (less efficient than a train, for those who would bike they don’t get exercise, not to mention taking ridership away from public transit). I mean, all companies have to deal with the last mile issue, but most aren’t wealthy enough to be able to let there workers bypass the way everybody else has to deal with it. It’s the same phenomena as rich people taking private jets: yeah, no shit it’s faster, but clearly this isn’t better for anybody but themselves. It’s sort of an elitist mentality that doesn’t improve our communities. Just because you have the ability to avoid the problems of society means you should. Instead, you could use those resources to help fix your community at large and not just yourself.

And really, when you include that the shuttle makes multiple stops, it’s not that much faster to take the shuttle compare to taking the bullet and biking on both ends. But I do think wi-fi on Caltrain would help.

TK

First of all, quit calling Mountain View ‘the suburbs.’ Mountain View is a city by every definition, and Google indicates as much. It’s as legit a city as San Jo is–that’s for sure.

You just can’t blame Google for SF’s continued slide into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, and the shuttles have as much (more, really) external benefit as would a really big carpool from said bedroom communities. If you want to consider the late 90s to be the start of all this, that means Silicon Valley workers slogged through 10+ years of crappy public transit to bridge with Caltrain (or BART + VTA, shudder, in the East Bay) in order to get to their jobs. The transit agencies aren’t adapting fast enough to commute patterns, and they’re just not getting workers where they need to be, on time. I mean, for god’s sakes, fellow Caltrain riders still grumble about the bike car–how easy do you think it would be for everyone to suddenly start biking to Caltrain? How long would Caltrain take to accommodate said bikes?

Anyway, I think Google’s point is that Mountain View has been very forward-thinking vis-a-vis TOD in the past, but it’s getting to be a bit like its sclerotic sister Palo Alto in hewing a bit too much to NIMBY influences. And perhaps they’re also a bit discouraged that Mountain View isn’t doing much to increase its appeal to young employees (so they have to keep shelling out for those dratted shuttles from SF!). You can call that the “San Jose” problem–without a critical density and appealing public spaces, you just won’t lure those kids down for a nice short commute.

Alai

The whole campus business that some of these companies come up with– it’s very odd, isn’t it? After all, is it really efficient to have a, say, restaurant or barbershop which only serves an artificially limited clientele? It seems to me that, having left the city and built their campus, they’re trying to drag along some elements of the city (though I guess the closed nature of the campus has a lot of advantages too, keeping their workers isolated and monitored).

I don’t really mind the shuttlebuses. Better than nothing, and it’s not really Google’s job to prop up Caltrain. If Caltrain did improve, however, with electrification and all that jazz it’s not too hard to envision it becoming a much more compelling alternative. Really, though, it’s the cities’ job to allow dense building near the stations.

Currently, it seems that Mountain View (like most municipalities) requires one ~350 square foot parking space for every 300 square feet of gross floor area of office space. That rule alone makes it rather pointless to locate near Caltrain or another transit hub, since you end up building parking for everybody regardless of how they arrive, and you need to buy lots of land to do it, so it may as well be cheaper land a little further out.

jd

TK wrote: “First of all, quit calling Mountain View ‘the suburbs.’ Mountain View is a city by every definition, and Google indicates as much. It’s as legit a city as San Jo is–that’s for sure.”

Okay, I’ll give you that it’s not the same as the suburbs of say, central Illinois. But it’s definitely not anywhere near the density of a “city” like SF. So it’s somewhere in between: let’s call it the urban suburbs. And yes, I would agree that density-wise, MV is not much different than San Jose. San Jose is a suburban city; it’s really a city for suburban people, and its downtown (huge roads, not much walkability, poor public transit, etc.) hardly compares to a city like SF.

“The transit agencies aren’t adapting fast enough to commute patterns, and they’re just not getting workers where they need to be, on time. I mean, for god’s sakes, fellow Caltrain riders still grumble about the bike car–how easy do you think it would be for everyone to suddenly start biking to Caltrain? How long would Caltrain take to accommodate said bikes?”

It’s not Caltrain’s fault, it’s the citizens’ fault. Hell, Caltrain can’t even get enough support from the citizens of the Bay Area (via taxes) to run what has been a very successful service since the introduction of the baby bullets, which is why they are currently having a financial crisis. What it all comes down to is: people are choosing to live far from their workplace, then choosing to drive back and forth to work, and then choosing not to support measures that would change this. Okay, granted, for the reasons discussed in my first paragraph, the Bay Area is better than many suburbs since it is this sort of hybrid urban suburban area. But still, the government would act very quickly if the people *demanded* it. If, on the other hand, the people sit by passively, then you get a government that doesn’t react.

It’s also nice to scapegoat our problems into one single thing (for example, if only Caltrain was better) because it makes the problem seem so easy to fix. In reality, the problem is much more complicated because it involves society-wide behavior change.

I believe that we need companies to step up and help lead this behavioral change. I think Google is doing a good job at that by demanding a more livable Peninsula. But I still think they could help even more by abandoning (or at least limiting) their shuttle service and sending those resources towards encouraging their workers to use public transit, and perhaps, if they decide to move, making sure it’s very near Caltrain.

By the way, Google a couple years back did open an office in SF exactly because they have so many workers in the city. My roommate at the time used to work for Google and commuted down from SF to MV (on the shuttle), and when they opened the office in SF, switched there. So I think that was a good move, and again reflects the idea that Google is much better than most companies about making our communities better.

NP

jd: “Okay, I’ll give you that it’s not the same as the suburbs of say, central Illinois. But it’s definitely not anywhere near the density of a “city” like SF. So it’s somewhere in between: let’s call it the urban suburbs. And yes, I would agree that density-wise, MV is not much different than San Jose. San Jose is a suburban city; it’s really a city for suburban people, and its downtown (huge roads, not much walkability, poor public transit, etc.) hardly compares to a city like SF”

Actually, Mountain View has a higher density than San Jose. Which might say more about San Jose than anything else.

But I’d like to reiterate TK’s point; Mountain View has never been a “suburb” in the traditional sense of the word. Parts of the city could definitely be described as “suburban looking” but that’s more a function of the era they were built in, and not actually related to how the city has ever functioned from a jobs/housing/commute perspective.

Let’s be clear about something: High tech companies never fled San Francisco’s Financial District to Sand Hill Road or the North Bayshore. Mountain View and Palo Alto both share title as the “birthplace” of the Silicon Valley (at the Shockley Lab and HP Garage, respectively). The high-tech campuses companies like Google are located in are deliberately modeled after the college campuses their employees are being recruited from, fitting for an industry that was sparked by innovation taking place nearby at Stanford University, NASA Ames, and across the bay at Cal. The orchards that once surrounded MV and PA in the 1950s made the construction of high-tech campuses a no brainer for the early innovators coming out of those institutions in the 1950s. As agriculture went away, the local families who worked in fruit canneries and fields were a ready work-force for the early semiconductor production industry that constituted the first wave of Silicon Valley companies. To make a long story short, the Silicon Valley phenomenon is not your typical suburbanization story.

San Francisco can continue to hope that more tech companies relocate here, and certainly some will due to the growing desire of their young employees to be in “The City” after college, but advocates of livable streets shouldn’t hold their breath for a wholesale shift of the tech industry from Silicon Valley to Downtown San Francisco. There’s too much history down there. Instead we should support cities like Mountain View that aren’t afraid to change, and have a lot of potential to become more transit/ped/bike friendly in the future.

Judging from its recent planning efforts (which focus a lot on TOD, walkability, mixed-use, etc) I have a feeling Mountain View will be a great place to see the transformation of mostly post-WWII suburban built-environment into a less auto-dependent area. I don’t think it’ll look and feel like San Francisco, it’ll be something new. A walkable, transit/bike friendly, mid-density city; a mix of what people like about both the suburbs and traditional urban cores. Fingers crossed…

Erik Baard

Two notes that might be relevant:

1) Google took over an existing office park, rather than custom building a HQ, so it will certainly have some off-kilter passes where logistics and values clash along its growth path.

2) I think a good number of readers and commentators are from New York City (I’m one), and so do sincerely view Mountain View as a suburban landscape. Just a cultural disconnect.

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